Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s last film certainly won’t be confused for a polite benefit performance by an artist bidding farewell to the world. As is typical for Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut is a moral and intellectual provocation, the result of a game played with the viewer’s expectations. The film—shooting took up to four hundred days, which was a record at the time and even made it into the Guinness Book—also confirmed Kubrick’s reputation as an incurable perfectionist. Eyes Wide Shut was inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella „Traumnovelle”, which is largely forgotten today. Although Kubrick moved the setting from Vienna to contemporary London, he remained true to the main subject of the book. Like its literary predecessor, Eyes Wide Shut is a perverse treatise on fidelity and desire that is filled with bold eroticism. The film was spiced up even more by the fact that the two leading roles—a couple struggling with a crisis—were played by one of the hottest couples in Hollywood at the time, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Piotr Czerkawski

American Film Festival Catalog

Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 in New York. He worked as a photographer for the “Look” magazine before he began his adventure with movies. His first pictures were documentaries. He directed his first feature film Fear and Desire in 1953 as an independent producer, which back then was not a common practice. A genius, an author of visually perfect, epic masterpieces, often about the most important matters of human’s nature: Paths of Glory, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Barry Lyndon.

American Film Festival Catalog